Future Galaxy Cluster Surveys: The Effect of Theory Uncertainty on Constraining Cosmological Parameters

Levine, E. S.; Schulz, A. E.; White, Martin

Future Galaxy Cluster Surveys: The Effect of Theory Uncertainty on Constraining Cosmological Parameters

Authors

Levine, E. S.

Schulz, A. E.

White, Martin

Description

Using the Fisher matrix formalism, we quantitatively investigate the constraints on a 10 dimensional space of cosmological parameters which may be obtained with future cluster surveys. We explore the dependence of the Omega_m constraint on both angular coverage and depth of field. We show that in each case there is a natural cutoff beyond which the constraints on Omega_m do not significantly improve. We also investigate the sensitivity of the constraints to changes in our knowledge of the Mass-Temperature (M-T) relation by including its normalization and scatter as two of the parameters in the Fisher matrix. To make our analysis more realistic, we have added, as priors, the Fisher matrices from hypothetical supernova and CMB experiments. We find that X-ray cluster surveys actually help to constrain the M-T relation, and explore the implications of this result.
10 pages, 7 figures